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DURHAM, N.H. -- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced
this week a University of New Hampshire experiment will be aboard a planned
NASA mission to study solar eruptions.

The Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission, scheduled for
launch in 2004, is a multilateral international collaboration involving participants from
France, Germany, the United States and United Kingdom.

STEREO will, for the first time, unveil the Sun in three dimensions. Its objective is to
address the origin, evolution and interplanetary consequences of one the most
massive disturbances in our solar system called the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME).
This will be achieved by launching two identically instrumented spacecraft, both in
orbit around the Sun, but one flying well ahead of the Earth and one behind.

Among the four sensors on board will be UNH's PLAsma and SupraThermal Ion
and Composition (PLASTIC) experiment, which will provide plasma characteristics
of protons, alpha particles and heavy ions. This experiment will provide key
diagnostic measurements of the form of mass and charge state composition of heavy
ions and characterize the CME.

PLASTIC is a collaboration of UNH, the University of Bern in Switzerland, and
Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, under the leadership of
UNH. Antoinette Galvin, UNH research associate professor, will lead this
investigation.

Says Galvin: "The success of this proposal is the direct result of the strong
leadership and support given by our Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and
Space (EOS) and the Space Science Center, the highly developed infrastructure at
EOS that is available for hardware projects of this magnitude, and the expertise of its
engineering and technical staff."

Berrien Moore III, director of EOS, notes, "This very significant NASA award to
Prof. Toni Galvin and her EOS colleagues is a reflection of not only their important
scientific ideas and abilities, but also of the proud and continuing heritage of space
science research at the University of New Hampshire."

The other institutions with STEREO experiments include the University of California
at Berkeley, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the French Centre National de
la Recherche Scientifique Observatory of Paris.

The two STEREO spacecraft will be built by Johns Hopkins University's Applied
Physics Laboratory. STEREO is a $150-million development mission -- $64 million
for instruments and $86 million for the two spacecraft -- plus $45 million for
mission operations and data analysis cost. Development is scheduled to begin
January 2001.

"Our primary objective is to study the stream of particles from the Sun called the
solar wind," Galvin explains. "We are especially interested in looking at solar wind
explosively released from the Sun as Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). These
eruptions are known to be a primary cause of space weather on Earth, potentially
causing disruptions in communications, power lines, satellites, and other technology.
In addition, we will be looking at other particles in space, such as material that comes
from outside the solar system -- interstellar particles called pickup ions."

Galvin's team will be building two identical PLASTIC instruments, one for each
STEREO spacecraft. The projected budget from spring 2000 until just after launch in
mid-2004 is about $4.7 million.

The key personnel at UNH in addition to Galvin are lead co-investigator Eberhard
Moebius; co-investigators Lynn Kistler, Mark Popecki, and Jack Quinn; and
associate scientists Martin Lee and Charles Farrugia. Eleanor Abrams, of the UNH
Department of Education, is an education and public outreach co-investigator.

This is Galvin's first "hardware" project at UNH. She came to the university two
years ago from the University of Maryland, where she was involved with instruments
that have flown on NASA's SOHO, WIND, Ulysses, ISEE-1, ISEE-3, and Geotail
spacecraft missions.

EDITORS, NEWS DIRECTORS: For additional information about the
STEREO mission and its payload, go to:
http://STProbes.gsfc.nasa.gov/stereo.htm and
http://sd-www.jhuapl.edu/STEREO/index.html